Zach Eikenberry

Growing Up in Indiana

He grew up in a county in Indiana where pigs outnumbered people and was the first in his family to go to university, Grit Daily reported. His personal website says he grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, studied Spanish language and literature at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico in 2004 and 2005, and graduated from Purdue in 2007 with a bachelor of arts in philosophy and religious studies and a bachelor of science in economics from the Krannert School of Management.

After graduating he received one job offer, from a medical records company. At the interview he stood on a warehouse floor looking at rows of empty desks left by layoffs, and decided the only real job security was to hire himself, Grit Daily wrote. He has not written a resume since. He ran federal contracting businesses from 2009 and co-founded Ledger Work, a contract management tool, in 2010, according to his website.

Building The NEXT Schools

In 2011 he and a group of Greenville business leaders founded NEXT High School, a public charter school built around projects and real-world work. He was not an educator. I was just a punk kid with radical ideas who wouldn't shut up, he told Designli. Students started real businesses, formed companies, raised money and filed patents. You'll never be unemployed if you can hire yourself, the school told them, and Our students don't play with Monopoly money. There were no custodians, so students cleaned up after themselves, and they started their own sports teams; one group raised money for a fencing team that went on to win state titles.

The NEXT Schools grew to two high schools and a middle school with more than 900 students and 60 staff, according to Hook Security, and he retired from the project in 2018. His website describes how he treated students as peers and professionals, and says that approach carried over into his security work.

Founding Hook Security

After leaving the schools he reconnected with a longtime friend, Adam Anderson, who was frustrated with how companies trained staff to recognize cyber threats. Eikenberry saw a familiar problem: It sounds like we took all the bad ideas from public education and moved them into corporate education. The two founded Hook Security in 2019, according to the company's about page. We spent a year researching the market, he told Expert Insights.

He pushed back on the security industry's habit of blaming employees. I often hear security professionals say things like, 'I built this impenetrable fortress but then Karen from accounting clicked the wrong thing, and it all collapsed,' he told Designli. It feels like building a new school all over again, except now, we're training adults. His summary of the approach is short: Train. Don't trick.

Psychological Security

Hook calls its method PsySec, short for psychological security, which teaches people why urgency, authority, curiosity and fear work on them, and uses humor and positive reinforcement, according to the company's about page. He has described himself as drawn to problems that have irreducible complexity, and at Hook he has worn many hats at once, from CEO to CFO and chief fundraiser, Grit Daily reported. TampaBay.Ventures led the company's seed round in 2023, and Hook now says it trains more than 250,000 employees a month.

Personal Life

He is a parent and thinks about how much of his children's data ends up online. I think about the kids, he said on the Truth In Cyber podcast. Since 2022 he has co-hosted the Two Stones One Bird podcast, where he debates ideas from philosophy to entrepreneurship, and he has given talks as a TEDx speaker, according to his website. He is a member of InfraGard, the partnership between the FBI and the private sector.